Best Free Screen Capture Software For PC

What do you think?

I record for my Youtube CHannel with Fraps - although a 5 minute video at full HD @ 30FPS is 35gb for me. + Fraps is limited to 10 minutes on the free version.

Otherwise, OBSProject also works well - although it is meant for livestreaming; you can still set it to record locally and not broadcast. I don't know the sizes because I've only seen my friend use it and it worked good.


But if you have looked at ones that are free and they are laggy - I would advise stopping the search because if one is laggy they all will be, and lagg there means a computer upgrade.
Also - if you have a decent computer and it laggs, try turning down the FPS rate to record at or the quality.

OptimusSnorr, on 16 December 2013 - 08:46 AM said:

Otherwise, OBSProject also works well - although it is meant for livestreaming; you can still set it to record locally and not broadcast. I don't know the sizes because I've only seen my friend use it and it worked good.

Yes. Open Broadcaster Software works excellently for me, and it doesn't use up that much CPU. Far better than Fraps.

I'd recommend turning off Aero if you're using Vista or 7 because it gives a performance boost (for some reason). Also, you should play with the x264 settings in case it's not encoding fast enough.

I love Fraps. I use the paid version, and use it to screencast a lot. And the performance boost is because it does not have to calculate and render the fancy glass effects. On windows (I have used this on 7 but I have not needed it on 8.1 so I haven't tested it yet) you can go to performance > adjust visual settings (or something like that) to turn off more of those fancy effects that lag you down.

longbyte1, on 21 December 2013 - 05:04 PM said:

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I'd recommend turning off Aero if you're using Vista or 7 because it gives a performance boost (for some reason).
…

That's because Aero uses hardware acceleration to render.

I have to agree with the OBS consensus. In my experience it's very easy to get up and running and can be used both for live streaming and just regular old recording of game play.

Hypercam 2.

By the way, everything is free.. if you download it from the right website :)/>

I use MSI afterburner which contrary to popular belief *can* record minecraft.

(Not free) Dxtory has a *bunch* of fiddly settings, so you can make it as quick or as high quality as you want, with the codec you want, and with any settings you want (depending, obviously, on the codec and what it exposes..).

Also, don't listen to that guy, you don't necessarily need to upgrade anything. Often, you can get away with selecting a different disk (from the game) to record to - dxtory lets you do that, otherwise there's a lot of IO going on at the same time, and the waiting for disk access *will* lag.

There's also settings. The smaller the file size/length, the more processing will need to be done on the fly, which of course means you're taking those resources away from the game.

screenr. The cool thing about it is that they have some error in their system that allows me to have unlimited times the business version :)/> It is online, but the bad part is you got only 15 mins even on business version… but it's cool

robhol, on 05 January 2014 - 08:34 AM said:

Also, don't listen to that guy, you don't necessarily need to upgrade anything. Often, you can get away with selecting a different disk (from the game) to record to - dxtory lets you do that, otherwise there's a lot of IO going on at the same time, and the waiting for disk access *will* lag.

I ran into this trying to record Just cause 2 multiplayer. Ran perfectly fine if I was standing still or stayed in a small area. Try and move a few blocks in the city though and it suddenly lag spiked. What was going on? Open a hardware monitoring tool, disk access as the game loaded content and Afterburner was trying to burn to disk. Set afterburner to record to my other hard drive, problem totally solved.

If your settings are low enough you could probably get away with recording to USB, alternate hard drive partitions *won't* help as they are the same disk though. Games are often fine playing from USB if you can be patient at the loading screen.


Screen recording is going to be saving alot of raw data onto your hard disk, your game might want to be accessing this data, a hard drive can only read or write at one time and also only at one location on the disk. In reality it will write a few bytes of data then read a few bytes and then write again etc, but then it has to spend time hopping back and forth across disk locations which also takes time.
Solid states are lesser effected than magnetic drives as they dont have to dart backwards or forwards across a physical disk so the delay in changing location (does exist) is much much lower to the point that its negligible and is also constant regardless of if you are jumping 2 cells ahead on disk or 5 billion (hence why defragging doesnt benefit them). They still have the restriction of only reading or only writing though and will still be bottlenecked by the sheer amount of data while recording.
The actual read/write time for a single bit stored on a magnetic drive isnt really any different from a solid state drive, its just the disk seek time being so so slow on magnetic drives and the read/write by block nature of NAND drives that allows SSD to get so far ahead.

Sure this screen recorder is for mac, (windows i havnt checked) but if you go on Quicktime Player(with the blue in middle and gray outside), it comes with Mac OSX 10.6.8, it records 720P and no-lag. Or at least for me. Its really handy if you want to show off something

Hypercam 2 is overrated :ph34r:/> , It isn't brilliant. The free Fraps is pretty good though.